eCommerce Retailers Weather Economic Headwinds With Help of Automated Tools

Intelligent eCommerce solutions offer businesses a smart lesson in how to adapt during tough times.

In the face of growing inflationary pressures, rising interest rates and other macro headwinds, consumers are increasingly comparison shopping around price and convenience.

By giving shoppers what they want at the price they want it for, eCommerce sellers and businesses can win greater loyalty and accelerate spend even in a bearish economic environment.

CommerceIQ Chief Financial Officer Jaya Jaware told PYMNTS about her company’s vision of building a retail eCommerce performance management command center and how CommerceIQ has course corrected over the past year to enjoy efficient growth.

Lessons in Adaptation

An emergent focus on the return on investment (ROI) of many processes that were once handled manually is why more organizations are looking into the benefits of intelligent, future-fit digital and automated solutions.

“Frugality is bringing out a completely different set of new ideas,” Jaware told PYMNTS. “Many, many people are saying, ‘Hey, I can automate this, I can automate this, I can automate this.’ So, there is a lot of importance now to automating certain things, even internally in companies [outside of the transaction occasion].”

An eCommerce management platform, CommerceIQ leverages machine learning (ML) to apply automation across marketing, supply chain and sales operations to help consumer brands grow market share and profitability. The platform serves more than 2,200 brands across 450 global online retailers in 41 countries.

“We literally changed our entire narrative,” Jaware said. “People are doing zero base budgeting, so we needed to be way more tightened up and work with their teams, do the audits. It became an ROI-based solution. We will impact your profit at this percentage. The story changed to profit recovery.”

As CFO, Jaware had to navigate that as sales cycles lengthened, clients were simultaneously looking at their working capital needs and moving away from paying annual upfronts toward monthly and quarterly payments.

“We needed to course correct internally all that cash and working capital which had earlier been coming in was now coming at a different cadence and volume,” she said. “So, it completely changed from growth at any price to growing at a reasonable pace, and now we are growing more efficiently. We saw a lot of success in 2022.”

Automation is taking place in companies’ accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) departments too, with firms of all sizes and business types showing interest in consolidating all nonpayroll spend management into one automated system.

Multiplatform Exposure

PYMNTS research showed that a record number of consumers are working remotely and using digital methods to shop for groceries and retail items much more frequently than consumers who do not work remotely, providing an attractive captive audience for eCommerce sellers who can engage them.

While behemoth retailers like Amazon and Walmart still command a hefty percentage of spend from eCommerce shoppers, Jaware said expanding CommerceIQ’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution across as many platforms as possible is more important than ever to the company’s future growth.

“eCommerce is still growing’ people are not going away from it at all,” she said. “They’re comparing the price. They’re not just going to Amazon, but they are still ordering online. The marketplaces are all growing, and omnichannel is becoming very, very important. And we are expanding our footprints to different retailers for more coverage for our brands. Whichever platforms they want to sell on, we want to be there for them.”

It has been projected that by 2025, 44% of all digital sales will come from mobile devices, showing that consumers’ quest for convenience isn’t stopping anytime soon. That’s according to “Digital Economy Payments: The Rise of Mobile eCommerce,” a 2022 PYMNTS report.

U.S. consumers alone participate in a reported 4.6 average digital activities each day, a frequency which is second only to Brazilian audiences.

“Globalization is a trend that will only continue to grow,” Jaware said, adding she sees direct-to-consumer (D2C) commerce contracting as retailer eCommerce and marketplace platforms like Target.com continue to grow.

Looking Ahead

As for what the CommerceIQ CFO sees coming up for 2023?

“We doubled up this year,” Jaware told PYMNTS, “and we want to double up next year too.”

For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.